


Echoes

by WellxWisher



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/F, F/M, One Shot, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-17
Updated: 2017-08-17
Packaged: 2018-12-16 11:26:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11827764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WellxWisher/pseuds/WellxWisher
Summary: Back from the dead, Charlotte Richards just wants to pick up the scattered pieces of her life--but once your body has played host to the Supreme Goddess of all creation, this might be an impossible task.Edited 8/30/2017 for spelling, grammar, formatting, and some new dialogue.





	Echoes

**Author's Note:**

> This plot bunny hopped into my head after I learned that Tricia Helfer would stay on as Charlotte Richards, and refused to stop making a ruckus until I wrote out this one-shot. First fic for this fandom, hope you enjoy!

Charlotte tapped her foot anxiously and glanced over at her husband. Elliot and the doctors had insisted that he do the driving for now. She had to admit, begrudgingly, that it was a sensible precaution under the circumstances.

After the adrenaline rush of waking up on the beach with two strange and distraught men had started to fade, she’d gone into convulsions on the way to the hospital. Her body chemistry, she overheard one of the ER nurses tell another, was “an absolute clusterfuck”—sodium levels through the roof, blood sugar spiking up and down for no apparent reason, and potassium levels so low “it’s a fricking miracle she isn’t dead.”

Two days in the ICU on an intense regimen of IV fluids brought her blood levels back to normal, but any and all memories of the past three months remained elusive. She stuck to the original story that she’d babbled at the paramedics on the way to the hospital: the last thing she remembered before waking up on the beach was getting in her car to meet a work client regarding a case.

That was a lie of course. The last thing she remembered was stumbling backward over her stilettos after finding poor Marco dead in the bedroom of the hotel suite, then a sharp pain between her neck and skull and then dear god, dear GOD, the sickly pale light and ashes…

But a former cop and high-powered defense attorney knows better to admit that. They’d transferred her to a private psychiatric facility as soon as she was stable, anyway. It ended up being a relief. They had drugs there, the good kind that give you a deep, dreamless sleep for days on end.  
  
When she woke up, somewhat refreshed, there was the battery of psychological tests, interviews with her partners at the firm, and more than one brain scan. Nothing unusual showed up. She passed all tests for lucidity and mental acuity with flying colors. She was not, in the opinion of multiple doctors, a danger to herself or others.

So, despite three missing months and no adequate explanation as to why they were missing, the hospital had released her, with strict instructions to take it easy, check in frequently, and start seeing a therapist when she felt up to it. And no driving.

This last instruction was particularly grating at the moment. Elliot drove too slowly, and Charlotte NEEDED, deep in her bones, to finally see her children.

Said children came flying out the front door as soon as they pulled into the driveway. Charlotte bolted from the car before Elliot had a chance to remove the keys from the ignition and braced herself for her twins’s infamous tackling hugs. She’d had Elliot bring her sensible shoes specifically for this purpose.

To her surprise, Helen and Oliver stopped abruptly before reaching her, strangely shy and subdued. Helen raised a tentative hand, and waved. “Hi Mommy,” they muttered in unison.

Charlotte made herself ignore this unexpected reaction, and smiled brightly. “Hi babies.” She held out her arms, but the children stood stock still. The smile faltered. “Ollie? Ellie? Do I not get a hug?”

The twins glanced at each other, then slowly moved into her arms. She held them as tightly as she could, kissing each of their cheeks, and signed with relief when both of them relaxed into her embrace.

“I missed you, Mommy,” Oliver chirped. “Are you feeling better?”

“Oh I missed you too, little bug. And yes, I am feeling much better.”

Helen nuzzled against her mother’s neck. “Thank you for letting us hug you again, Mommy.”

The way she whispered those words, so soft and quiet that they might have been mistaken for a quick breath, broke Charlotte’s heart. A sob threatened to surge up her throat, so she closed her eyes tightly, screwed up her courage, and put on a brave smile as she gently disentangled herself from the twins.

Elliot, who had just paid the babysitter and sent her away, walked over to join them and ruffled the children’s hair. “Getting hungry kiddos?”

An enthusiastic chorus of “Yeses!!!” broke forth, and her heart lightened a little. This felt normal. This was good. She laughed. “Well then, how about I make dinner? Something fun…maybe my homemade Mac n’ Cheese? Or that Spicy Chicken Casserole we all like?”

Oliver and Helen glanced at each other, barely concealed expressions of abject horror on their small faces, before turning to their father and pinning him with identical, imploring glances. Elliot, who’s own face had gone a bit ashen at her suggestion, recovered enough to offer her a fake grin.

“Uh…that’s nice, Charlotte, but aren’t you tired? You’ve had a rough week. We’ll order a pizza instead.”

He grinned at the kids, a genuine one this time, then actually pulled out his phone to begin ordering the food, without waiting for her to respond. A patronizing Elliot? This was new. This was decidedly not good.

A small, hot knot of rage twisted in the pit of her stomach, and without thinking she reached out and snatched the phone from his hand. 

“ _ **NO.**_ ”

The tone of her voice—imperious, threatening, and…thunderous—took Charlotte aback. The children actually cowered, eyes wide. Elliot wavered in place. Her rage faded to embarrassment, and guilt, and she was overcome by a desperate need to regain control of the situation.

“I mean, don’t be ridiculous, it’s a school night,” she scoffed. “The children need something healthy for dinner. If you insist upon getting takeout at least order something with actual nutritional value.” As an afterthought, she handed Elliot back the phone.

He took it, gave her a hard look, and nodded. Charlotte mumbled some excuse about getting settled and fled into the house.

The dinner that followed was an utter failure. The children turned up their noses at the healthy Chinese takeaway Charlotte had insisted upon—ginger chicken and steamed veggies over brown rice, with egg drop soup—and barely made a show of moving the food around their plates. Elliot ate only the chicken and soup and left the vegetables and rice untouched. “Cutting back on carbs, like you asked,” he explained. Later, after she’d cleaned up the dishes, she walked into the living room and found the three of them curled up on the couch, munching on a bag of potato chips and sipping on soft drinks.

She briefly considered chastising them, then decided that a glass or three of wine by herself in the kitchen would be less hassle.

On her fourth glass, after she heard Elliot usher the children upstairs to their beds— _“Quiet kiddos, let’s not bother your mom; probably needs some time to herself”_ —Charlotte decided she would make a damned casserole after all. She gave up after a messy 45 minute search of the cabinets revealed that her once-respectable collection of bakeware was nowhere to be found. Abandoning her kitchen to chaos, she finished the wine and trudged upstairs to bed.

+++

She dreamt of sinking, sinking slowly into dust under a sickly pale light and suffocating clouds of ashes, inside a sinister heat that seemed to vaporize the her blood and desiccate her skin so that it dissolved and swirled into a smoky haze. Over and over again, until some force jerked her back, and up, and there was merciful blackness.

+++

Elliot was sitting by the bed when she woke up well after 11AM, wearing a guilty expression and bearing a tray with water, coffee, and aspirin. She took them gratefully, though the hangover she’d expected was strangely absent.

At first her husband babbled, telling her how he’d taken the kids to school that morning, and they’d been more boisterous than usual, excited for the last week of classes. The cable company had called and would be sending a worker by at some point later that day to fix the broken line. He’d done a load of laundry, made a shopping list for later, and by the way, would she mind if they did spaghetti and meatballs for dinner tonight?

Charlotte huffed out a mirthless chuckle before taking a sip of her coffee. “What happened to cutting back on carbs?”

To her surprise, he didn’t answer, merely shooting her a dark scowl as he took an angry sip from his own cup.

They were silent for a moment, glaring at each other, before the anger faded from Elliot’s face, leaving only a sadness behind. “I’m sorry, Charlotte. But I can’t do this anymore.”

He’d tried, he explained, earnest, tried really hard for so long. At one point he’d even been at peace with the distance in their relationship. They had good money, lived in a great house. They both generally agreed on how they wanted to raise Helen and Oliver, and he enjoyed being a stay-at-home dad and doing his own thing while she did hers.

But then she’d disappeared for over a week three months ago, police detectives had come by the house and discovered several thousand dollars worth of cocaine hidden in the garment bag with his wedding tux, and when Charlotte had finally come home she was…different. She didn’t seem to know him, know the kids, or even her own house; she didn’t know where things went or how they worked, and she’d started no fewer than five fires in the kitchen. It was like a stranger was walking around in his wife’s body.

Not all the changes were bad. Eventually she seemed to take an interest in Oliver and Helen, even though their actions appeared to constantly baffle her. She’d even started sleeping with Elliot again…the best sex of their marriage, he said.

But about a month before she fell off the pier, something changed again. She distanced herself from the children, and threw herself into work, and was rarely home. When she was, she was cold to him, and to the kids. If they asked questions, she shut them down.

Then he got the call that she’d fallen off the Santa Monica pier and gone into convulsions on the way to the hospital. He’d sat by her bed in the ICU, signed papers, and made arrangements for her transfer to the psychiatric hospital.

When Elliot had been packing her things to leave the hospital, he found her phone. He hadn’t meant to snoop when he opened the waiting texts—he’d assumed that work contacts would need to know that she was unavailable. The messages and voicemails from Daniel Espinoza, however, had absolutely nothing to do with Charlotte’s legal work. Neither did her correspondence with Amenadiel, a man who called her “Mom” and made several references to “Dad” and Heaven and Hell and a dead son named Uriel. About keys and flaming swords, and the devil, who owned a nightclub. About them leaving, and going home to Heaven to see her other children.

Charlotte stared, unable to say anything.

Elliot continued, seeming unnerved by her silence. He hadn’t told her doctors about the contents of her phone. Honestly, he wanted to see if Charlotte would bring any of it up herself while she was in the hospital or after they’d come home, but she hadn’t. Then not three minutes after getting back, her temper flared over pizza, she’d downed bottle of wine, torn apart the kitchen, and, after she finally came to bed, woke Elliot up with thrashing limbs and moaning about ashes and pain and heat. She made enough noise enough noise wake the kids in their rooms down the hall.

It was just too much. She understood, didn’t she? That the personality changes, the secrecy, the bizarre company, the cheating, the constant emotional whiplash…he couldn’t handle it anymore, and neither could the kids. At least not for now. Maybe a break would be good for all of them, and then later they could try again. He didn’t want to do this, he didn’t want to leave her…she understood, right?

Numb, Charlotte nodded. Together they quickly hashed out the logistics—Helen and Oliver would go to their sleep-away camp a week earlier than originally planned, and Elliot would spend a few weeks with his brother in San Francisco. When camp was over, he’d collect the kids and they’d spend the rest of the summer at his parent’s lake house in Tahoe. Charlotte would have the house to herself and all the peace and quiet she needed to figure things out. She could even visit them from time to time, if she felt up to it.

The details sorted, Elliot reached out and took Charlotte’s hand for what she supposed he meant to be a reassuring squeeze, but the gesture seemed empty and only served to heighten the awkwardness. He quickly excused himself to go to the grocery store and pick up the dry-cleaning before collecting the kids.

Charlotte retreated to the shower and sobbed until water from the faucet ran cold, and forced her out, shivering.

+++

She decided not to look at her phone or start sorting out the mess that was her life until Elliot and the children were gone, so Charlotte spent the next week on autopilot. She cleaned the house. She packed the kids’ bags for camp. She made cupcakes for the school picnic and managed hide her annoyance when Elliot and the kids seemed genuinely surprised that they were edible. She joined Elliot in cheering for the twins at their elementary school graduation, and smiled for all the requisite pictures. She took over the bedtime routine and read stories and tucked them in and told them she loved them. Once she was sure Elliot was snoring and oblivious to the world, she’d get back up and watch her children sleep, for hours.

The night before they were set to leave for camp, it happened.

She was standing in Oliver’s doorway, marveling at how he was able to sleep in such a ridiculous position, when she heard her own voice behind her. 

“I will admit, they did start to grow on me. They can be sweet, especially when sleeping. Nothing compared to my own children, of course, but still, more endearing than I would have expected.”

Charlotte whirled around to find…herself, yet somehow not-herself, leaning casually against the wall. “Who…who are you?”

The not-her smiled pleasantly. “Yes, I suppose we haven’t been formally introduced. I’m the goddess of all creation. Until recently my divine essence inhabited your body after your colleague from the law firm murdered you.”

“Murdered me?”

“Yes. Ice pick to the base of the skull, it was quite painful when I had to pull it from your meat-suit.”

“I died. I was dead?”

Not-her/goddess? rolled her eyes. “Yes, you were dead, and I inhabited your body until my son cut through the fabric of reality and sent me off to create my own universe.”

Charlotte squeezed her eyes shut.Clearly she was asleep. This was just a bad dream.

“Yes, you are asleep.But this is no dream, Charlotte. This is quite real.”

Charlotte opened her eyes to find the her-shaped-goddess looking back at her indulgently. Detective and attorney skills utterly failing her, the only response she could muster was “Why?”

The goddess frowned. “Why what? You’ll need to be more specific.”

“Oh…ok. Why did you…inhabit my body?”

“Simple. I’d just broken out of Hell and needed a physical form so that I could traverse this plane of existence. Your soul had just vacated yours. It worked out well.”

“Worked out well? I was dead!”

“Yes, and you’re not now are you? You’re welcome, by the way, for bringing you back from Hell.”

Charlotte froze as the dream came winding back into her memory. Sinking, sinking slowly into dust…sickly pale light…the ash, scorching…

“Yes, not so pleasant down there, is it?” The goddess inclined her head knowingly. “I stripped your soul of most of your memory of the place. The amount of time you spent imprisioned, you’d be insane and useless if I hadn’t.”

Charlotte laughed, because what else was there to do? “I’m not so sure it I’m not insane now.”

The goddess smirked and arched an eyebrow. “Perhaps. But not so insane that you’re useless.”

Charlotte’s mouth went dry. “What do you mean?”

She didn’t answer right away, instead wandered across the hallway to an open door, and looked in on Helen’s sleeping form. Not knowing what else to do, Charlotte joined her, and they stood in silence for several moments before the goddess finally spoke.

“Would you willingly leave Oliver and Helen behind forever? Would you walk into a new life, head held high, knowing you’d never see your children again?”

“Of course not.”

“And neither would I. I had to find a way to stay in this universe. So I brought you back, Charlotte, used the rift in time and space left by Azreal’s blade to snatch your soul from Hell and put you back in your body. And then I left behind a small, small bit of myself in you. You’re my connection to this world now…my eyes, my ears. You’re going to look after my sons for me, let me see them from my own universe.” The goddess smiled at her once-vessel fondly, reaching up to cup Charlotte’s cheek with a gentle hand. “And perhaps, as my power grows, you’ll be my key back to this one.”

It was the touch that did it. For all the gentleness in the caress, Charlotte felt power, felt reality, felt the worlds making and unmaking, felt the weight of truth.She trembled.

The goddess scoffed and looked heavenwards. “You made them ridiculously fragile, you know.” She turned her attention back to Charlotte. “There there, don’t look so horrified, dear, stop shaking. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“Nothing to be afraid of?You’re going to use me, take over me…”

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic. I am rather busy, you know, building my own universe, creating new cosmos and the like. And I don’t yet have the power to completely control you from across dimensions. You’ll still be your own person, the vast majority of the time. For now. I’ll just be checking in every now and again while you sleep. And you won’t even remember my visits afterwards. I’ll make sure of that.”

Charlotte laughed.“Then what’s the point? How can I be your little spy if I can’t even remember what you want me to do?”

“I didn’t say you’d forget everything. Just my visits, the contents of our conversations. You’ll still do what I want. I left enough of me inside of you to make sure of that. As time goes on you’ll stumble across memories I created while I was here, feel the lingering effects of the celestial powers that grew inside of your body for so long. Echoes, if you will, of our shared past, as well as echoes of your own time in Hell. That will be enough to drive you to seek out my sons, to make yourself a presence in their lives.”

_No. NO._ “I don’t want this.”

The goddess reached out her other hand, ran it through Charlotte’s hair, comforting, eyes full of sympathy. “I know, my brave Charlotte, I know.” She leaned forward and kissed Charlotte’s cheek, tenderly, lingering by her ear. “But I don’t care.”

The goddess withdrew from Charlotte, shrugging. “Free will for humans was my ex-husband’s thing. I have no compunctions about using you for my own purposes. Now, I must be going. Take care Charlotte…I’ll see you soon.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Hope you liked it, comments and constructive criticisms always welcome :)


End file.
